


forget-me-not

by yeou_bi



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: M/M, Mystery, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 14:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30090282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeou_bi/pseuds/yeou_bi
Summary: Chanyeol has a recurring dream in which he introduces himself to the same boy over and over again.
Relationships: Kim Jongin | Kai/Park Chanyeol
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	forget-me-not

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this outside AO3 in 2015, so if it feels familiar, that's probably why.

Ever since his second year of high school when he had recovered from a really bad stomach flu, Chanyeol had had a strange series of recurring dreams. Although they were all set in different places and during different seasons, they always began with almost exactly the same conversation he had with a boy he didn't know who wore the same school uniform as he did.

It was always him who started. Depending on the place, he asked the boy which school he attended, stated that they went to the same school then, and realized that the boy was in the grade below his.  
"Oh, that's my school."  
"I'm in the third grade now."  
"How come I've never seen you in school before?"

At first, the boy usually tried to get rid of him, but Chanyeol always persisted, although he never really knew why. Something told him that they absolutely had to talk.

They exchanged names over and over again because Chanyeol never seemed to be able to remember what the boy was called. The odd thing was that only his memory lacked, because the boy never looked surprised, no matter what Chanyeol told him.  
"Sorry, what was your name again?" Chanyeol sometimes had to ask, and the boy always gave him a tired expression, as if he was getting sick of it. Chanyeol's mind was like a sieve, and the longer a dream went on, the hazier it felt. During the first couple of months, he couldn't even remember much when he woke up. He just had a vague feeling, like a strange aftertaste.

Then, after a while, he sometimes still recalled bits in the morning. He would brush his teeth and think of those sceneries and conversations that seemed so stupidly familiar.  
"So is your classroom the one with the broken window?"  
"Oh, really? I'm in the third grade."  
"Do I know you from somewhere?"

The boy's name and face always were a blur, but at some point, he figured out why the world around them always seemed clear. Their conversations always began with an actual memory. They began with that day when Chanyeol was cleaning sponges behind the school or with him putting Baekhyun in a headlock. In his memories, there was no strange boy he somehow knew and yet didn't, but in the dream, he always appeared and changed everything. He accidentally emptied a bucket with water on Chanyeol's head or was hit by the shoe Baekhyun threw.

They talked, the boy tried to get away but didn't, Chanyeol realized that they were a grade apart and that the boy actually was two years younger than him.  
And then he woke up but could neither remember his name nor his face.

It probably wouldn't have mattered, had the pattern not changed. He would have never thought much about it, had he had the same conversations with the same boy for years and years to come. If anything, it would have become a funny story on parties, had he been able to say that he had introduced himself to the same guy for twenty years.  
But the more often he had the dreams, the longer they got and the more parts of them he remembered.

A year had passed, and his finals were slowly coming closer, when he woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. He rubbed his runny nose, and when he turned on the light, he realized that his fingers and his pillow were covered in blood. It made him nauseous, and he couldn't say whether it was the sight of blood or the fact that so much of it had come from his nose.  
He swore under his breath, hurried to the bathroom, and washed his face. And as he stared at his pale self in the mirror, he realized that something had changed. He knew what the boy looked like. It was like a picture engraved in his mind, not like a dream image, but as if he had looked at a real person.  
It made him uncomfortable because it was much too clear. He couldn't think of anyone but his family members he would have looked at long enough to remember their features that well.

He tried not to think of it. His mind was messing with him, or so he told himself.

But then, when he went to school the day afterwards, he unwillingly looked at the windows of the second floor where all the classrooms of the second grade were. Hadn't there been a broken window at the beginning of the term? Hadn't the boy in his dream confirmed that it was the one in his classroom over and over again?

Chanyeol didn't mean to make a detour on his way to the cafeteria during lunch break, but the fact that there was a fight in the toilets on the third floor gave him an excuse to use those on the second floor. The ones around the cafeteria were always too crowded, or so he would have told anyone who might have wanted to question him.

He had already reached the corridor when he realized that he didn't know which classroom the broken window had belonged to, although the boy had told him before. Like the visitor of a zoo who pretended to be indifferent as he tried to catch a glimpse of a rare animal, he strolled past the rows of windows. It was slightly embarrassing because he knew many of the faces. Many of them lived in his neighborhood, so they clearly knew that he wasn't supposed to be there. He also walked too slowly for someone who supposedly headed towards a toilet.  
Ridiculous. He was being ridiculous, and after the second classroom, he was about to hurry off, when he had a short glance into the third one. There it was, that face, and he involuntarily stopped in his tracks.  
The boy sat at one of the desks next to a window facing the sports ground, and just impassively stared into the distance. Someone crashed into his desk after being pushed, and the boy almost fell off his chair in surprise. "Woah, shit," he exclaimed and laughed in a voice that sounded much too familiar. It made Chanyeol's stomach turn.  
At first he just slowly walked away, but by the time he had reached the staircases, he was running.

Why would someone he didn't know appear in his dreams?  
Was this one of those supernatural things one of his aunts was obsessed with? Did someone curse him?  
Or was he haunted by a ghost? Was it even possible to be haunted by the ghost of someone who was alive?  
Was he maybe psychic and knew that the boy was going to die?  
It didn't make sense.

Now that he knew his face, he constantly saw the boy in the real world. He saw him being dropped off in front of the school by a lady in a red car, realized that he was in the same class as the daughter of the owners of the Chinese restaurant in his street, and almost ran into him around the wash-basins behind the cafeteria when the boy had a really bad nosebleed. He tried to talk to him then, and a couple of times after that, but something always prevented him. The boy was forever something he only saw from a distance, as if he was walking towards a mountain in the desert. No matter how far he got, the mountain never seemed to get closer.

Still, the dreams continued and grew more and more vivid.

In his dreams, he asked the boy who the lady in the red car was, and was told that it was his older sister.  
"The one who's a vet?" he would ask, and couldn't remember how he knew. It was odd because he didn't even know the boy's name.  
"No, the one who studies law," the boy would say with a shrug. "The car is her boyfriend's."  
And when Chanyeol would nod, somehow concluding that she was dating a lawyer, the boy would give him a really troubled look.

In another dream, he bumped into the boy in the cafeteria on the way to the bin and accidentally spilled his leftover soup over his tie. The boy said it was fine when Chanyeol already pushed him towards the wash-basins and pulled his tie off his neck. He was surprised at his own lack of reserve, and at the boy who just let him. He cleaned the tie and asked whether the boy ever went to his classmate's parent's Chinese restaurant.  
"I didn't even know they had a restaurant," the boy said, and Chanyeol noted that the girl was a little quiet. He only knew her because his father loved Chinese food and because she often made the deliveries to his house.  
"That one time the doorbell was broken, but she was too shy to yell, so she just left the noodles in front of the door. My mother almost tripped over them, and I had to walk to the restaurant to pay," he said.  
"Oh, that was her?" the boy asked, as if he had heard the story before, and looked caught when Chanyeol gave him a puzzled look in return.  
Chanyeol was about to ask whether they knew each other after all but was interrupted by his own carelessness when he made even more of a mess of both the tie and his own pants by spilling water all over himself.  
"Shit," Chanyeol gasped and jumped away from the wash-basin. The boy burst out laughing, and Chanyeol pulled a face.  
"Be honest here, do I look like I peed myself?", he asked, and the boy would stare at the spot a tad too long.

The confusing thing was that he didn't just remember things said in the dreams, he suddenly knew things he had no way of knowing. He knew that the boy's grandmother had a dark brown dog called Tofu and that he spent a great amount of his free time asleep. He knew that some of his neighbors had been convinced that he was a girl when he was small and that he was really thrifty and hated to spend money on gifts. He even remembered a dream he must have had during the last school term in which the boy had given him bandages as a birthday present. "You'll forget about it anyway," the boy had said jokingly, as if he knew that he was part of something that wouldn't last.

But despite everything he couldn't recall his name, no matter how often he heard it.

"Sorry, what was your name again?" he asked near the end of a very long dream. They sat in the boy's room, after Chanyeol had invited himself over, and played games. Two days earlier they had met in the bookstore near the station when Chanyeol had spotted him wearing his school's uniform. It was one of those dreams when his memory was particularly hazy, and when he asked the same questions as always.  
"Is that the classroom in which someone broke a window?"  
Later he realized that something about his cluelessness seemed to have put the boy at ease, as if the dream only went on for that long because he didn't scare him away.  
The boy said his name, but it was as if Chanyeol couldn't hear it, as if someone had suddenly turned down the volume around him. He stared at the boy's lips, but couldn't make sense of the words.  
"Why do I always forget everything?" he asked much too loudly and was surprised at his own voice. The boy avoided his gaze. He knew. He knew all the answers. "Why do you know more than I do?"  
The dream ended, but it left Chanyeol with the impression that it had never been him who had a say in anything. The one to decide how far they got had always been the boy, as if Chanyeol broke into his world and made a mess of it.

"You know me, don't you?" he asked one morning after running across the schoolyard because he had spotted the boy entering the school. He was out of breath, and the boy was startled.  
"I don't," he muttered and made it very obvious that he did.

"Look, I don't know why this is happening," he said urgently when he skipped the queue in the cafeteria and walked up to the boy who stood in a group with his friends. A girl in the second grade clicked her tongue at him, but the others just gave him odd looks. He was older and taller and more determined than them after all. "I don't know if this is karma, or whatever, but honestly, it's driving me crazy. I know that you know me, I just don't know how. Is this some past life bullshit? Did I do anything to you?"  
The boy pretended not to hear him.

There were more and more dreams filled with him confronting the boy again and again. They got shorter and ended more violent. He woke up with headaches and nosebleeds, felt nauseous, threw up in the middle of the day, and almost nodded off in school and in the bus, and at the dinner table. But there never were any answers that made sense.

He sat on a low wall behind the school during lunch break because the stuffy air inside had made him sick when the boy walked past with a group of his classmates. They all carried brooms and buckets, so Chanyeol at first didn't mean to disturb them. He didn't feel well enough to argue anyway. The whole thing was growing him tired.  
But then the boy slightly turned his head into Chanyeol's direction and their eyes met for split seconds. Before he knew himself what he was trying to get at, Chanyeol yelled, "Do your friends know that you're sometimes checking them out in the locker room?"  
The boy dropped his buckets and stared at him in horror. His classmates gave him uncomfortable looks.  
It puzzled him, and when Chanyeol woke up from his nap on the low wall behind the school as the boy walked past with a group of his classmates, he wondered whether he hadn't actually finally understood something essential.

The next time they talked, he had a proper plan. The less he knew, the longer the boy would talk to him, so he had to stall time. Maybe it would finally make sense if he just asked the right questions.  
He tried to make everything look like a coincidence. When the daughter of the Chinese restaurant's owners had made a delivery to his house the day before, he had told her that he would pay in school.  
Before he left his classroom then, he picked a stupid fight. "Oh Minkyung, are you into midgets?" he asked the prettiest girl in class, and she gave him the same arrogant look she gave anyone who dared to talk to her. She was like a goddess, or so some of the boys claimed. "Because I have a friend who has a crush on you," he continued and gestured into the direction of Baekhyun, who grew pale like a ghost.  
"Tell your midget friend that I have a boyfriend," Minkyung said lamely and flipped her hair.  
"Pity," Chanyeol grinned and left, followed by Baekhyun who was confused and angry, and by Jongdae who tried to meddle.  
"Who the hell are you calling a midget?" Baekhyun burst out, and under normal circumstances, Chanyeol would have apologized. There were dozens of advantages to being short after all, and he knew that it was unfair to reduce people to their height, but this wasn't about what he really thought, but about his very own stage play.  
"I mean, I was just trying to be helpful," he shrugged. "I thought we all knew that we're the dynamic uno and two halves. Snow White and the Two Dwarves. A planet with two moons."  
He had reached the second floor and was loudly calling out to the daughter of the Chinese restaurant's owners when he reached her classroom. He leaned through one of the windows, and scanned the room, purposely ignoring the boy's desk. "Lee Misun, I'm here to pay my debt," he chirped.  
"What the fuck is wrong with you today?" Baekhyun behind him hissed.  
This was the moment.  
He slowly took out his wallet, when he saw that Misun looked embarrassed as she hurried towards the door. In the corner of his eyes, he noticed the boy and smiled when he turned back to Baekhyun, still leaning far into the window.  
"What the fuck is wrong with your mother for giving birth to a midget?" he asked, and tried to look earnest, but couldn't suppress his laughter.  
It was as if everything suddenly changed into slow motion. Baekhyun's face dropped, and before Jongdae had a chance to take a hold of his arm, he punched the right side of Chanyeol's head.  
He had never been hit before, at least not like that, so it caught him by surprise how much of his orientation he lost. He half fell through the window and on the desk of a boy who loudly swore. His books and a metal pencil case dropped on the floor. Misun or some other girl shrieked, Jongdae yelled something, and Chanyeol's world became a blur.  
He didn't know what he was saying, but it clearly made Baekhyun even angrier. Chanyeol rolled through the window and inside the classroom, Baekhyun charged after him through the door. Jongdae held onto his sleeve and fell backwards when Baekhyun just got rid of his blazer. People yelled and jumped out of the way, chairs and tables tumbled down, more and more arms in dark blue sleeves held onto Baekhyun like a tentacle monster, and someone helped Chanyeol up and hurriedly pulled him away from the scene.  
"Are you drunk?" a familiar voice sternly asked, and it took Chanyeol all his might not to break out in even more laughter. He had known it. He didn't know why but he knew it would be the boy who helped him out in the end.  
"Who the hell are you to ask your upperclassman if he's drunk?" he asked in return and tried to sound as aimlessly irritated as possible.  
The boy sighed.

"You're in Lee Misun's class, right?" Chanyeol asked when he sat next to the water-basins behind the school and watched the boy who wetted his handkerchief. "I was about to give her money, but I probably shouldn't go there again. Could you give it to her?"  
The boy frowned, and handed Chanyeol the wet handkerchief so that he could put it on his swelling eye. "What's the money for?" he asked, as if he couldn't already guess the answer.  
"She made a delivery to our house, but we realized too late that none of us had any cash with us," Chanyeol explained and winced in pain when he blinked.  
The boy gave him a strange look, as if he knew that he was the cause for the whole mess, and pretended to be less clueless than usual. "Her parents own a restaurant, don't they?" he asked.  
"Yeah," Chanyeol nodded, and they remained silent for a while. He wondered when the boy would end the dream, and whether it would maybe continue on and on, if Chanyeol was careful enough.  
Or was this real? Was this the moment when he and the boy really met for the first time?  
He hoped it wasn't. The consequences of the fight were nothing he wanted to live through. But the pain definitely felt genuine.  
"Why did your friend hit you?" the boy suddenly asked quietly, and Chanyeol pulled a face. There was no way to explain it in a way that didn't sound ridiculous.  
"I called him a midget," he simply said, and the boy gave him a doubtful look, as if he knew that Chanyeol was aware how much his friend hated to be called out on his height as if he knew that Chanyeol sometimes complained about being too tall and as if he remembered that conversation when they had agreed that it was annoying to constantly bump one's head and to never find decent clothes that weren't too short.

"What's your name?"  
"How come I've never seen you in school before?"  
"Is your classroom the one in which someone broke a window?"  
"Have you ever been to your classmate's restaurant?"  
He asked the same questions as always, and for the first time, he felt as tired asking them as the boy when he answered.

They walked home and it slowly grew dark, when Chanyeol stopped in the middle of the road. The boy was a few steps in front of him and turned around with a curious expression.  
"Your father is a surgeon, right? And your sister a vet," Chanyeol said, and the boy slowly nodded, as if he wasn't sure whether he had talked about the both of them this time around.  
"So you probably know something about illnesses and stuff," Chanyeol continued. The boy gave him a wary expression as if he got himself ready to end everything.  
"I've had these weird dreams for months now," Chanyeol said. "At first they were always the same. I always met the same person and we talked about the same things. When I woke up, I forgot most of it. I guess that's what dreams are usually like."  
The boy seemed uncomfortable and avoided looking him in the eye. Still, he allowed him to go on.  
"I don't know what changed, but lately I remember almost everything. Sometimes I'm not even sure whether I'm dreaming or whether something is real. This feels real, but I know it can't be. I never get to talk to you outside a dream."  
There was something like a wave washing over him when the boy stared at the ground with a painful expression. The street, the trees, the buildings, everything seemed to shake.  
"I don't know how you're doing this, but I won't stop until I find out, even if it makes me sick," Chanyeol said hurriedly and felt as if a heavy weight was pressing on his lungs. "And I mean, it literally makes me sick. It hurts. The less I forget, the more it hurts."  
His nose was running and when he wiped it with his hand, he realized that his nose was bleeding again. The boy noticed it, and quickly took a step forwards, but it already was too late. Everything became dark around them.

When Chanyeol opened his eyes again, he was on his way to the staircases. It was a bright morning. Students loudly chatted around him. A girl whose name he had forgotten gave him an odd look when she saw his face.  
"Who the hell are you calling a midget?" Baekhyun burst out behind him, and he stopped. Blood dripped on the floor in front of him, and he wasn't sure where it was coming from. At first, he instinctively touched the skin under his eye, the one that was supposed to be swollen. But it didn't hurt. It was fine. He just had a nosebleed.  
"Park Chanyeol," Baekhyun angrily said and grabbed his shoulder, but immediately let go when he saw the blood. "Shit, are you all right?" he asked and seemed genuinely worried. Friendship was a funny thing.  
Chanyeol had to laugh when he dropped to his knees and fell sideways.  
"What did you do to him?" Jongdae asked Baekhyun, and knelt down beside Chanyeol.  
"I didn't..." Baekhyun muttered in confusion. "He just..."  
They tried to drag him up and to the nurse's office, but he couldn't take a single step. Everything was spinning, even the darkness when he closed his eyes as if his head was caught in a washing machine.  
They somehow managed to make him sit up. A crowd formed around him, and everyone knew best what to do.  
"We need to call an ambulance."  
"No, we need to get him to the nurse's office first."  
"Someone needs to carry him."  
"We need to get a teacher."  
Someone dabbed what felt like toilet paper under his nose, someone else held onto his shoulders to stop him from falling down again. And then, suddendly, the wall of blue blazers and grey pants and skirts broke, and someone new entered the scene, someone who didn't belong in the real world. It was the boy, his eyes wide. He was panting, as if he had run all the way up to the third floor. He must have known what was going to happen.  
It was yet another puzzle piece, and it finally felt as if the picture was beginning to make sense, no matter how twisted it was.  
"Jongin-ah," Chanyeol said in a nasal voice. It was ridiculous how helpless the boy looked, although it had all been his doing. "I get it now. It never actually was a dream, was it?"

When he woke up, he wasn't sure where he was at first. The bed felt hard and there was a sterile smell around him. When he blinked, golden light blinded him, and a hand suddenly covered his eyes.  
At first it confused him, but then he snorted, "What the hell? I'm not a baby. You can't make me fall asleep by making me close my eyes, Jongin-ah."  
The hand moved away and the boy, Kim Jongin, looked flustered when he muttered, "It was at least worth a try."  
Chanyeol smiled weakly and rubbed his throbbing head. It was a mess, as if his mind was suddenly filled with too many mismatching memories. They were in the nurse's office the mob of classmates had somehow managed to get him into. They had all chatted wildly until the nurse had ushered them away. She had given him some medication, and his nose had stopped bleeding after a while. When he had somehow fallen asleep, the world had still been spinning.  
It was still now, but even more confusing than before. It was odd to look at the boy's face now, as he sat on the chair next to the bed, and to remember everything he had told him before. He was real. He was Kim Jongin, two years younger, and a little shorter than him. He had almost been hit by the ball that broke the window at the beginning of the term. He often seemed a little arrogant, but only because he was a bit of an introvert and sometimes didn't know better. In his class, he was the youngest.  
"How did you know it was me?" Jongin asked awkwardly when Chanyeol had stared at him for too long.  
"Who else would it be but the culprit himself?" he asked lightly.  
Jongin miserably looked at his hands, and for a second Chanyeol felt bad. He still didn't know why these things were happening. Everything about Jongin felt familiar, but he couldn't remember when they had really met for the first time, or why Jongin would have wanted to make sure that they always went back to being strangers.  
Had he done anything to him after all? Did he have the right to just break into his life like this?  
If he thought about it, it definitely wasn't a good sign to be forced to forget someone over and over again.  
"I didn't know that you..." Jongin began, still fixating his own hands. "It wasn't supposed to hurt."  
Chanyeol sighed, and looked at the white ceiling for a few seconds before he slowly tried to sit up. He still felt dizzy, and Jongin immediately jumped up to help him. Something about the sudden closeness confused him, and once he sat more or less straight, Jongin sat down on the chair again, slightly pushing it back a little further. It was as if he tried to distance himself, but knew that he couldn't run this time.  
"Does it hurt you?" Chanyeol asked, but Jongin didn't answer right away. "Is that why your nose bled the other day? Did we talk and then I forgot?"  
There was another long pause, before Jongin quietly admitted, "It sometimes hurts."  
Chanyeol pulled a face. It was frustrating to think of how little he had understood, how little he understood even now.  
How did all of that even really make sense?  
"Just what the hell happened?" he asked in frustration. "We were friends, right? I knew you really well, didn't I? So how... why... What did I do that was so bad?"  
Jongin looked cornered, as he had so often before, and for a moment Chanyeol thought that he was going to end the scene again.  
But then they were still in the nurse's office and he still felt dizzy and the afternoon sun was still warm, when Jongin quietly said, "Sorry."

"So, how did you do it? How did everyone forget everything?" he asked when they sat at the bus stop. They were taking different bus lines into opposite directions, and both of them had just watched several of their buses pass by. None of them said a word about it, but they knew. Chanyeol had gone with Jongin before, and Jongin with him. But no one but them remembered.  
"It's not that easy..." Jongin muttered and stared at the street stall on the opposite side of the road.  
"Try me," Chanyeol said. "I'd believe about everything by now."  
Jongin sighed, and looked troubled, as if he didn't really know the right words. He probably had never spelled it out.  
"I turn back time," he finally said. "To the moment before something happens."  
Chanyeol blinked and looked at him in bafflement until he really understood what he had heard. "What, you mean, like, time travel?"  
It sounded ridiculous, and the look on Jongin's face prove that he realized it. "I guess," he said.  
"Huh," Chanyeol said, and frowned at the street in front of him. Time travel. Time travel? It would have explained why nothing ever prove any of the things he remembered. There were no bandages on his birthday, no bruises in his face, no wet pants. Because those things he remembered had never really happened, at least not in the final draft of his life.  
"So what's the furthest you ever went back?" he asked curiously, and Jongin's face darkened. They slowly seemed to get closer to the roots of the whole problem.  
"Three years," he said shortly, and Chanyeol didn't dare to ask whether those three years had gone lost because of him.  
He looked at his phone. In two minutes the next bus would arrive, but he wasn't ready to end the day. It scared him to let go because he still feared forgetting everything the moment Jongin got out of sight.  
"Are you hungry?" he asked and nodded towards the street stall. Jongin gave him a wary glance, as if he was unsure what to do, now that he couldn't easily make things undone. Then, after biting his lips, he nodded, "I am."

"Shit," he said, and hurriedly started to wipe his shirt with a paper napkin. Jongin across from him just smirked like a brat, although Chanyeol had horror visions of his mother scolding him for spilling sauce over his expensive school uniform. It was bad enough that he stayed out late, but obvious evidence like that just made it worse.  
He looked at Jongin, pointed at the orange spot that had slowly grown bigger, and thoughtlessly asked, "Can you make it that this never happened?"  
Jongin's smile faded, and he seemed to hesitate, before he answered, "I don't think I should."  
"Right," Chanyeol said, and probably sounded a little abrasive, when he went back to wiping his shirt.  
"I mean, sorry, I," Jongin hurriedly added, and looked flustered again. "I've done it too often. But then everything just got worse."  
Chanyeol was about to mention that the sauce stain couldn't possibly get any worse, but decided to not say anything at all. This wasn't about sauce. He understood that much.

"How did we really meet for the first time?" he asked when they walked along the street in a random direction. He had the vague feeling that they were running in circles, but there still was some time until the last buses left.  
"After school I bought hairspray for my sister and you chatted me up, because you needed money," Jongin said and didn't make it sound like a very happy memory.  
"And then we got friends after I returned the money to you?" Chanyeol asked hopefully, although that idea seemed rather doubtful. He didn't like to admit it, but it did sound like him to randomly borrow money from someone who wore the same school uniform.  
"No. You couldn't remember my name and called me Hairspray for the rest of the term," Jongin said glumly, and Chanyeol pulled a grimace.  
"Oh," he said, and they remained quiet for a few seconds. "How come I don't remember that at all though?" he then asked in puzzlement. Hairspray didn't ring any bells, not like other memories that suddenly appeared when he tried to think of them.  
"It never happened," Jongin said, and when Chanyeol was about to protest because there were other things he remembered that never happened either, he added, "And it's... it's been a while. It didn't mean much. I just didn't like the name, that's why I started from there."  
"I see," Chanyeol said, and tried to imagine it. Something that simple could change so much. He had most likely borrowed money from someone else, and Jongin must have gone to another store. And then they met again and again in other places, as if it was inevitable. To Jongin it must have seemed like a sick joke when Chanyeol just chatted him up in corridors and bookstores and the cafeteria and at the bus stop instead.  
"But we were friends, weren't we?" he asked after a while because something about his memories seemed amiss. Nothing explained that feeling of familiarity.  
"I guess," Jongin replied vaguely.

"The ball originally hit me," Jongin suddenly said. They sat next to a vending machine in a small park Chanyeol had never been to before. He wasn't completely sure where they were, and how he was supposed get home, but it didn't matter. He could wait until the sun rose if that was what it took. He would just sit there with his canned juice, and listen to the cars in the distance, desperately waiting for another bit of conversation.  
"What ball?" he asked in confusion, and Jongin looked impatient, as if he was tired of having to explain everything from scratch.  
"The ball that broke the window in my classroom," he went on. "It hit me and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in the nurse's office and you were on the other bed playing games on your phone."  
Chanyeol frowned and tried to think back to that day. It was already after he had slowly begun to realize that he constantly introduced himself to someone. On that day he had sprained his ankle when he jumped down a flight of stairs to reach the second floor and have a look at the commotion. He had been brought to the nurse's office, where he waited for his mother to pick him up. But there hadn't been anyone on the other bed, and he hadn't heard of anyone being hit by the ball.  
"You can't remember," Jongin said, and some of his excitement flared down. "It's been a while."  
There it was again, that phrase. To Chanyeol it had been less than a year. But Jongin must have relived so many moments of his life, it probably really was a faint memory to him. "How long exactly is 'a while'?" Chanyeol slowly asked. "To you, I mean?"  
Jongin seemed to think about it for a while, and furrowed his brows when he said, "I don't know. Years." Even to him, that seemed hard to believe.  
"Did you turn back time and avoid getting hit?" Chanyeol asked, and Jongin shook his head.  
"This time I did, then I didn't. That's how we became," he made an awkward pause before he concluded, "friends."

It was past midnight when they stood in a convenience store with two cups of instant coffee. The clerk was a guy who didn't seem to be much older than them, and who clearly didn't care that his only customers were boys in high school uniforms who were probably supposed to be at home.  
Jongin still had his shoulders hunched and looked tired, but he at least wasn't shaking any longer. It had suddenly got incredibly cold outside. The noises quieted down, the sky turned into a dark brown, and the further they walked, the shorter Jongin seemed to get in his attempt to hide as much of himself in his blazer as possible.  
Jongin yawned, and Chanyeol was still staring at the tropical cover of a travel magazine, when he asked, "Is it fun to relive high school?" When Jongin just gave him an impassive side glance, he added, "I mean, if you went back three years, then you were already in university, weren't you?"  
"Yeah," Jongin said with a distant expression. "But that's not why..."  
"Why you came back?" Chanyeol asked helpfully, and Jongin nodded. "So why did you?"  
For a second Jongin seemed about to give another evasive reply to stall time, so Chanyeol asked, "Because of me?", and immediately bit his tongue. Impulsive questions had thrown them back over and over again.  
Jongin's answer seemed to become another moment of silence that would drag on for minutes before one of them decided to just change the topic. He tapped the surface of the table they were standing at, looked into the distance outside, and shrugged, "Yeah. Because of you."  
Before Chanyeol could ask anything else, Jongin already left for the door. He seemed composed, and Chanyeol couldn't tell why, but he knew that Jongin coolly fleeing a scene usually meant that he was flustered. That's why he always ran back into the past. To avoid something that made him uncomfortable.  
Chanyeol hesitated for a few seconds before he finally followed him. He wondered what that past him, or future him, that him he would never be, had done.  
Jongin was waiting outside and gave him a short funny look. He seemed weary, like a criminal who was sick of the pretense and who would answer anything, if only it was the right question.  
"Was it because of something I did?" Chanyeol asked. When Jongin looked tired, he changed the question to the one he had before. "What did I do?"  
Their eyes met, but Jongin immediately fixated the ground. Then, after another pause, he said, "You left me behind."  
Chanyeol frowned, and said, "Oh."

The sky was slowly lighting up, although the sun wasn't showing itself yet. The world around them slowly gained back its colors, when Jongin began, "I was in third grade when I first..." He seemed lost for words again, as if he didn't really know how to describe something he never had to describe before.  
"When you first went back in time?" Chanyeol asked helpfully.  
Jongin cringed a little, probably because it still sounded strange said out loud. "Yeah," he said with his hands in his pockets. They were walking along an empty street. Every now and then a lonely car would pass by. "When Tofu got," he began, and then suddenly looked up. "That's my grandmother's dog. He's called Tofu, but he's actually," he hurriedly explained.  
"Dark brown," Chanyeol interrupted him a tad too impatiently. "Yeah, I know."  
Jongin seemed taken aback for a second. "Right," he said and probably wondered how much else Chanyeol would remember. He maybe had never really thought about the side effects of his doings. To turn back time must have seemed like a way to cleanly erase everything he wanted to see undone.  
"When I was in third grade, Tofu got run over," Jongin resumed his story when he had finally gained back his composure.  
"Oh," Chanyeol said and felt stupid because he didn't really know what to say any longer. He knew where the story was going because he knew that the dog was still alive in his memory.  
"It was my fault," Jongin said absent-mindedly, as though he was talking about a dream. "I let go of him and he was run over. Just like that. It was just a short moment and he died. Because I was an idiot."  
Chanyeol said nothing because it didn't sound like a normal conversation he and a boy he barely knew were having. It sounded like an old justification, like something that wasn't meant for him but for the one he would never be.  
"I didn't know what was happening then, but I just, I don't know, I wanted him back. And suddenly we were at that street again, and I held onto him, and he lived. It was that easy. I thought it was the right thing. I always just wanted to do the right thing."  
He looked at him and seemed desperate, and Chanyeol didn't know how to react.  
"Did you ever tell me about that before?" he asked, and Jongin looked like a deflated balloon. Had that been the problem? He wondered what it would be like to have to power to redo all his actions so that he never really made any mistakes. There would be no more arguments because he would always know what caused them. No more nagging parents, no more bad grades, no more sprained ankles or angry friends. It really seemed easy.  
But something about it must have gone wrong, or else Jongin wouldn't have gone through all the trouble to change back into his high school self.

"You said that everything got worse when you did that time travel thing," Chanyeol said, not really sure what point he was trying to make. He tried to make sense of everything, but the more he thought about it, the more confused he got. "Worse how? I mean, you also said that people aren't supposed to get hurt. So how can things get worse when you make sure that everything goes right?"  
Jongin stopped so abruptly, that Chanyeol got a few meters ahead of him before he turned around in confusion. He gave him a questioning glance, when Jongin said, "Imagine someone always does everything right, but you still do everything wrong. How would that make you feel?"  
Chanyeol blinked. "What do you...?" he asked, when Jongin continued, "That's what you asked me before. You asked whether I would like to be around someone who never makes any wrong decisions. I didn't know what to say then because I never thought about it that way. I thought that I would hurt people less if I make everything right."  
He wasn't talking to him then, not really, and Chanyeol was even more dumbfounded. He couldn't really imagine himself getting angry at someone for being too perfect, but then again had he never met someone who wouldn't have made any mistakes. It would probably make him look bad, kind of the way he looked bad when his friends had better grades than him.  
"Well, I hate to look stupid," he said in confusion, and Jongin scoffed, as if he had heard that argument much too often. Chanyeol frowned, and asked, "So what, you're saying that I left you behind because you did everything right? Where was that anyway? On a field trip? In a bar? Did you make me look stupid in front of my friends or something? Did I punch you and you wanted to make sure I won't do that again? Is that why you tried to cut me out of your life?"  
And just as he uttered those words and saw Jongin's pained reaction, he understood.  
"Or do you mean...?" he asked. "Oh," he said and felt the blood rushing into his face. "You mean, you meant that metaphorically?"

"So, we were, like," he began and stared at the neon sign of a drug store on the opposite of the street. He didn't finish the sentence, and Jongin seemed absent-minded again. Chanyeol didn't even have to look at him to know what kind of face he was pulling. He always tried to look cool. The more awkward he felt, the worse his expression got.  
How would Chanyeol know that? How would Chanyeol remember that face although all his memories had been taken away? Because he must have stared at him until the image had been burnt into his mind.  
Why would he spend so much time staring at someone? That was the question where he had always stopped before. Sure, it had puzzled him when Jongin in what Chanyeol had believed to be the real world had looked exactly the way the supposed dream image had, but that had been the least important part of the whole mystery.  
"So that means that I," he said, and narrowed his eyes at an advertisement on a passing bus. It showed two actors whose names he couldn't remember, and he tried to make a conscious decision as to who he found more attractive. The lady in the dress? The guy with the tie? He liked the guy's haircut. Did that mean anything?  
"And when you say that I left you behind, you mean that I...?"  
A few workers in overalls went past them and gave them odd looks. It was early morning, and Chanyeol was tired and confused and irritated.  
"Look, you should go home and just forget," Jongin quietly began, when Chanyeol interrupted him.  
"Before you turned back time, did I...?" he asked and felt weird. He was unable to finish his sentences because he didn't even know if he wanted his questions answered.  
"Break up with me?" Jongin asked tiredly, and Chanyeol cringed. "Do you really want to know?"  
"I guess?" Chanyeol said vaguely, and his face muscles felt leathery in his attempt to appear as if he was not in shock. Wasn't it stupid to feel shocked? If this was based on decisions his alternate self had made at some point, did he even have the right to? In middle school, he had tentatively had a girlfriend and hadn't liked it, but hadn't really explored that any further. Wasn't this the big solution? So in someone else's memories he had been in a, in some kind of a, partnership thing with some boy. Was that really so strange? Wasn't that why he always ended up chatting him up in his obsession?  
"I must have really liked you a lot," he said out loud and only realized how strange he probably sounded when Jongin looked even more flustered. Would that past future him found that reaction cute? Possibly. Probably. He honestly had no clue. He wasn't that person. He could understand why it would wear him out to be around someone who always made the right decisions, but he didn't want to be the person who never wondered whether there maybe was more to it.  
"So, if you had said something then, the one I'm now wouldn't exist, I guess," he said, and it felt odd to think of it that way. It made him feel unreal.  
"I didn't want you to know," Jongin said. He rather had nosebleeds and headaches and ran than to tell anyone, but it didn't seem right to confront him about that. If anything, it only meant that Chanyeol himself had been too untrustworthy.

Chanyeol sighed when Jongin rubbed his tired eyes. They stood on a bridge and stared at the grey river below them.  
"So, what now?" he asked, and Jongin gave him a short questioning look. "I mean, now that I know, what are we going to do? I can't pretend not to know you at all, but if you want me out of your face, I can stay away."  
Jongin seemed perplexed, and said, "I don't..."  
"Don't what?" Chanyeol asked and tried to suppress a yawn.  
"I don't want you out of my face," Jongin said in an almost too earnest tone.  
Chanyeol nodded. "All right. I will bother the hell out of you then."  
Jongin laughed, and Chanyeol snorted, and then, when he felt unstable and wondered whether the ground shook, he asked, "Am I going to forget about this?"


End file.
